The big interview: Blake Morrison

IT’S a jewel of a day. An almost preternatural brightness bounces off every surface, while a cooling swirl of breeze breathes down the hillside from moors once trodden by a certain trio of gifted sisters and their brother.

There’s a handy bench outside the West lane baptist centre in Haworth, with a view of snaggle-toothed gravestones, the last resting place of those who led a long and full life and those whose days were cut tragically short.

Across the road is the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the former home of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, their brother Branwell and clergyman father Patrick.

The weekday tourist buses haven’t arrived yet, although a sprinkling of visitors are already making their way through the small rooms where the learned, ambitious sisters dreamed their dreams and created a handful of books that would (and still do) captivate the world.

Blake Morrison, son of Thornton-in-Craven, now 61-year-old husband and father, acclaimed poet, memoirist, novelist and librettist living in South London, is back on native soil for a couple of days because he’s written a play about the Brontës, produced in collaboration with Northern Broadsides, the company of his old friend Barrie Rutter.

As a Skipton Grammar Schoolboy, son of two doctors (“in a house that was surprisingly short of books”), 14-year-old Blake wrote his first poem as English homework, and sought inspiration for it by sitting in the local church graveyard.

He says a good day is one in which he manages to write a poem, so maybe I should just abandon him here on this bench, on this beauty of a Yorkshire morning. The muse would surely rise up...

Back in the 19 60s, even living as close to Haworth as he did, Morrison doesn’t remember any kind of fuss about the Brontës. “Obviously, they’d lived not far away, but I don’t remember either my parents or anyone at the Grammar School making anything of the Brontë connection, the fact that we had this extraordinary trio of literary talent on our doorstep.”

Morrison caught up with Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall some years later, and has explored these celebrated tales with scores of MA students on the courses he has taught at Goldsmiths University of London. He had to swot up on the lives, works, loves and letters of the Brontë family many years ago when the composer Howard Goodall approached him to write the book of a stage musical of Wuthering Heights.

“Howard did the songs and Leicester Haymarket (theatre) were keen to produce the show. But the boss left and moved on, policy changed and the new management didn’t want it. I reprinted one ballad I’d written for it, and still have the songs Howard composed. It was disappointing, but there haven’t been many projects that haven’t eventually come to fruition.”

It clearly galls Morrison, although he is too darned nice to say it outright, that of several proposed shows of Wuthering Heights that were doing the rounds at that time, the one that did get produced starred Cliff Richard as Heathcliff. “Cliff Richard! I remember it getting lousy reviews…”

Blake Morrison says there’s a general feeling around that anyone who has a go at staging Wuthering Heights will encounter a default bad attitude from critics. “There’s always been a mocking, sneering thing around them (the Brontës) – which you can only have, I believe, if you don’t understand their novels or their lives.”

Well, undeterred by that, and at the suggestion of a theatre critic friend 10 years ago, Morrison had a go at a play which would examine the lives and aspirations of the Brontë sisters, using the template of Chekhov’s comedic portrait of Russian social disintegration Three Sisters, published in 1900.

“I went away and read the Chekhov and Juliet Barker’s Lives of the Brontës and took lots of notes. We know that Chekhov had read about the Brontës, probably in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte, and their story was clearly an influence on his play.

“I went through all the parallels and characters… Olga, Masha and Irina in his piece even have a troubled, destructive brother. Chekhov has a doctor and teacher in his play and so does mine.

“There are many similarities, but there are also differences between the two, and the more I worked on it, the further I moved away from the original, so as to avoid misrepresentation of the lives being explored.”

The piece was put aside for a good few years while Morrison worked on poetry, libretti and novels, then a nudge came from Barrie Rutter at Northern Broadsides. The writer had worked with the Halifax-based company on five previous adaptations, and Rutter was keen to see We Are Three Sisters off the shelf and on the stage. So 18 months ago Morrison took up the story again, and rehearsals are now underway for a nationwide tour, with the premiere in Halifax next month.

But why not simply write an original play based on the famous family?

“Many people will think that’s what it is,” says the writer. “But those who know their Chekhov will see the likeness. Using the Chekhov as a template for another, very big, story helps to somehow contain it. It restricts you as a writer and helps you to focus.

“I think there are two or three ways in which it sheds new light on the Brontë story. For a start the grimness of the Brontës’ lives has been exaggerated. There were tragedies, but that didn’t mean they were miserable all the time. There’s a kind of resilience there and a determination to support themselves by writing.

“Also, there’s an impish humour in Charlotte’s letters from time to time that overturns a stereotypical view. I use the humour in the Chekhov to help show that.

“Before the Reverend Nicholls and Charlotte’s marriage there’s no evidence of love interest in the Brontë sisters’ lives, but we know from their work how interested they were in thinking about women, love and marriage. Again, these are subjects helpfully explored in the Chekhov.”

The other thing, says Morrison, is that Haworth is often portrayed as a remote spot where the family were trapped leading narrow lives, when in fact they did travel. And yes, they even heard Paganini play in Keighley. Winters may have been long and brutal, but we know from the nature of their writing that these women’s imagination was limitless.

Morrison thinks some diehard Brontë fans may bristle that he has played with chronology in order to make theatrical sense of his fictional story. However, he feels he has done his best to honour the Brontës by creating real, plausible, sympathetic characters.

The call of family, writing and teaching commitments means he doesn’t see as much of Yorkshire as he’d like these days, although does regularly visit his sister back on the old turf near Skipton.

“In my head, Thornton-in-Craven is still home in one sense. I go and stand in the garden of the house my father built in retirement and it triggers so many memories. You think you have memories until you come and stand on the spot. My sister lives in that house, so I am lucky.”

One of his early influences was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, found in his mum’s bedside cupboard. He still loves reading and teaching Lawrence, as well as Larkin, the poet who has exerted the greatest influence on him of all.

Morrison’s name shot to worldwide fame thanks to the filming of his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? Starring Colin Firth as the younger Blake and Jim Broadbent as his father, it detailed Blake losing his virginity to “Sandra” the housemaid at the age of 14 and his father’s affair with a local woman called “Auntie Beaty”. The memoir was fond but also very painful in its warts-and-all portrayal of the father-son relationship.

“I wrote it in the year after my father’s death, and it was my way of trying to understand it all… I was in a bad place, not in a normal state of mind in that my normal sensitivity to what is sayable and what’s not wasn’t operating.”

Does that mean he regrets writing as he did, especially while his mother was still alive? No, not really.

“My mother probably had more doubts than she let on at the time, but on the whole friends rang and said they’d enjoyed it. If they said they hadn’t, she just said I’d made it all up.”

After his mother’s death Morrison wrote another family memoir, in which he explored his mother’s story, especially her Irish roots. He was shaken to find out that Kim Morrison, born Agnes O’Shea in County Kerry, had changed her name to Kim and suppressed not only her accent and nationality but her Catholicism in order to fit into a middle-class British family and make a life here. “It was quite shocking to me, having grown up in a secular household, to realise that religion had been a huge issue before I came along, and she had to change who she was because of my grandfather’s (on his father’s side) prejudices.”

In unravelling his Irish family, Morrison thought he would uncover a heritage of writers and poets that would help to explain his own bent towards writing (which had “sort of bewildered” his parents early on).

Instead he found entrepreneurs and shopkeepers. “I’m a bit less romantic about Ireland now, but reading my parents’ letters to each other helped me to find out things about myself.”

He’s pleased that he wrote those difficult memoirs. “They gave my parents a life beyond the grave and beyond the place where they lived and worked. Strangers got to know them in some ways, so I’m glad I wrote those books.”

We Are Three Sisters premieres at Viaduct Theatre, Halifax, September 9-17 (01422 255266). Then Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough Oct 18-22, Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, Oct 25-29, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield Nov 2-5, York Theatre Royal, Nov 22-26.